[jnordwick]

I'm going to need some data to prove this. I keep seeing this claim, but have not seen anything more than conjecture. There are just too many factors for this, and you would have to believe that a company is willing to throw away money for this to happen.

[EasyMark]

There are tons of articles out there about mayors/council members/ etc pressuring execs to get butts in office seats for the past few years. I don’t know if that counts as data to you or not, but they are relatively easy to find in a google search.

[berniedurfee]

It’s the other way round many times. Companies get fat tax breaks to move into a particular town or city.

Those tax breaks are explicitly contingent on butts being physically in seats to add to the economy and tax revenue of that municipality.

Too few butts in seats triggers penalties or revoking of the tax breaks altogether.

[jnordwick]

>Too few butts

/Dr Mephisto enters the chat/

[dehrmann]

City governments have no leverage to pressure businesses with, though.

[jagged-chisel]

They already threw away the money by purchasing real estate and falling for the sunk cost fallacy.

Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.

Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.

[appendix-rock]

That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.

[The_Colonel]

Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).

The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.

[ohmahjong]

It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).

My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.

Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.

[erik_seaberg]

It's all guesswork until we start measuring the impact of interruptions in open plan offices vs. homes (which is going to vary with families).

[cudgy]

Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.

[erik_seaberg]

I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.

[The_Colonel]

"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.

I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.

[erik_seaberg]

I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.

[hackernewds]

2/3 of corporate real estate are empty and the commercial real estate market is due for a major crash. a lot of assets on companies balance sheets are for the offices that they own. or leave empty while leased